Born 1955 and raised in Benalla, Victoria until leaving for the University of New England NSW in 1973 where he studied for a Marketing (bachelor of applied economics 1975). Chris married and eventually had four daughters. Five years as a Credit Manager for the Yellow Pages before became a Career Counsellor at Parade College, Bundoora, for twenty years, during which time he studied part-time for a Grad Dip in Career Counselling & Training, and then progressively innovation and engineering finishing up with an engineering masters degree/MBA under Professor Murray Gillin (who was at the time the president of the Institute of Engineers) at Swinburne University in a Masters program called Enterprise Innovation.
Continuing with Career Counselling (becoming president of the Career Education Association of Victoria) on an independent basis during the 90s he counselled over 8,000 students in all and also began consulting on engineering and innovation management projects beginning with winning the team leader prize and four other prizes from the Victorian Enterprise Workshop.
Since the early 90s he has consulted at a senior level with some of Australias largest firms on change management and commercializing new technologies in the Environment, Water and Energy Sectors and was also granted a scholarship to study a PhD looking at the key success factors in commercializing Government Funded R & D in the Environment, Water and Energy Sectors. Although he did not submit this doctoral dissertation due to family and professional commitments he did complete all of the research (1788 projects) and all of the literature review and acquired a number of promising technologies.
The two that ultimately emerged as a focus for his entrepreneurial bent were Aquifer Storage & Recovery where he established in partnership with others a company Australian Groundwater Technologies Pty Ltd to commercialize this technology and where this company now has 45 sites scattered throughout SA. The second company he created in partnership with others was Desaln8 Pty Ltd. It has a patented technology capable of extracting fresh water from saline water aquifers. Chris also has interests in other companies and has been on school boards, parish councils and industry bodies.